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Comment by scblock | Hacker News Reader

The problem is drivers, every single time. DRIVERS hit pedestrians. If a pedestrian avoids it because they hear a motor that's a NEAR MISS that STILL needs to be addressed by drivers. Drivers have all the responsibility.

This is not an electric car problem. This is a DRIVER problem. And needs to be addressed from that perspective.

Just yesterday I was nearly hit by two drivers. One turning right on a full red who didn't slow down any more than they would on a green light. I was in the crosswalk. Then a driver turning right at a stop sign who didn't even look to their right. I was in the crosswalk.

Don't talk to me about TECHNOLOGY. Tell me how we fix DRIVING.

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If the idea is just we tell people they need to be responsible or slap them with harsher penalties after the fact I doubt it is going to help that much. A lot of the answer involves technology (even if the “technology” is speed bumps or different kinds of intersections) to make it less likely that an inattentive driver has the opportunity to hurt pedestrians.

There's a technology called a driver's licensing and examination bureaucracy. It was invented hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago (not for driving obviously but the basic idea of having a state bureacracy that administers exams and tracks and validates agaainst something like a written database of who has passed them in exchange for special privileges under the law -- the Chinese had a merit exam system in ancient times for xample; medieval Europe had all kinds of licenses, guilds, and other ways individuals had to prove they were good enough to be able to do something, for bettter or worse).

In other countries with more stringent licensing systems, driving poor behavior is much less.

So yeah, it's an easily solvable problem that involves just being willing to better apply an ancient technology.

I'm not kidding about calling this a technology -- you need writing and central state administration to carry this out, and those were pretty big advanced 10,000 years ago. We should probably have figured it out by now here in the backwards (on this specific topic) USA.

Could you expand more on what you mean in place of the sarcasm/exasperation of how obvious it is? The US has drivers licenses, driver examinations for those licenses, and revocation penalties (similar to most other countries) and the problem persists so it seems there are particular changes to those you think would resolve things?

Make them harder. Most require no effort at all.

And make revocation easier, or mandatory after a fatal collision.

Look up what drivers licensing is like in Japan, for example. Much tougher, in the same way AP Calculus is tougher than Remedial Algebra. Couldn't even pass on an automatic transmission until a few years ago.

Or hell, just compare one US state to another. In Arkansas, I got a driver's license and didn't ever even have to prove I could parallel park. In northeastern states, that would be wild.

Or christ.... even in the US, within a state, compare the requirements for a CDL to a standard class D license. It's, rightly, much tougher. Require every driver to pass to a CDL standard and accidents would go down dramatically (I'm not proposing this exact intervention, just an example).

Require drivers to demonstrate greater skill when taking the examinations, and they will have to have greater skill when driving. Simple. Works everywhere but here somehow.

Sarcasm is very warranted because you failed to do even cursory research and instead assumed that the US is magical, special, unique, and nowhere else could possibly be different.

Sarcasm in discussion is never warranted here.

I appreciate you explaining your particular position on what needs to change so I don't have to assume so. I disagree this approach is a silver bullet and we should ignore other technologies though I definitely agree some of those changes to the process could help overall. Japan, as you mention, has possibly the strictest drivers license requirement programs in the world but still ranks 29th in deaths per vehicle mile. The US has far from the worst driver testing and regulation but is still 4th on the same list. There are, of course, a lot of other factors and variables than just the drivers test and miles driven conflating that data but if it were really the be all end all to road safety there shouldn't be so much to still improve in Japan's case and the US shouldn't be quite so top of the list. Other country's numbers are often definitely better than the US, and I never implied it wasn't or couldn't be I just didn't want to assume which reasons you were intending to push about it, but there have to be other factors going on beyond drivers license regulation differences to explain improvements and, presumably, other new things we could do like GP was discussing.

I do agree some changes you mention (like standardization) could be useful but I'm not really sure some others (like testing with a manual transmission) are helpful or relevant to road deaths. Harder does not necessarily equate to safer or vice versa. You mention Arkansas being different than northeastern states and I'll add that even a test in upstate New York vs downstate New York will be very different. Definitely a good case for standardizing what's tested how strictly more. I'd also like to see standardization across states on things like when licenses are revoked akin to the issue the sibling comment mentions around at fault deaths. In all I think this class of solutions is just one improvement of many that need to be done to solve the problem.

> In northeastern states, that would be wild.

I got my license in Connecticut and nobody asked me to parallel park.

So again your solution is, what, revoke people's licenses after the fact? Perhaps we're too reluctant to apply that but that is something that can happen to you already. But it's too late at that point. Making the licensing test harder is not going to prevent people from driving carelessly; it is an almost charmingly naive view that the problem of inattentive drivers is that they don't know better and can just be educated more. Many of the people at fault in these accidents have been driving for decades and have a level of experience far beyond what any licensing regime on the planet would have required them to have.

Defining safety as a univariate problem is naive at best. All robust safety protocols involve multiple, redundant layers. This means both drives and electric cars are part of the problem. Denying this makes about as much sense as being mad at the clouds.

This is so silly. Technology is a variable in road safety, if that variable can be manipulated to reduce accidents then of course we should look at that. We’ve been doing this for decades already. Technological regulation of cars has had a massively positive impact on road safety outcomes. Your argument is all of that was pointless and we should have purely focused on improving drivers? No, obviously we do both. Obviously!

I think we also need to fix communication. If I am at the corner of a road waiting to cross one direction and the other direction turns to walk the car doesn't know if the pedestrian is going to cross or not.

Maybe if you had been making more noise the drivers would have noticed you!

That's ridiculous, it's not every single time.

The examples you list are because of drivers blatantly breaking the law.

If a pedestrian walks across the road without giving way and only manages to backtrack because they heard a vehicle, that's a near miss that is the fault of a pedestrian not the driver.

Drivers do not have all the responsibility in all cases.

It's always drivers fault because they are the ones who chose to operate heavy machinery in the vicinity of random people.

A while ago I had to brake hard because a person jumped onto the highway trying to cross it. Would it be my fault if we made contact?

yes, if there are pedestrians present around your anticipated trajectory you should always adjust your speed to the level that lets you stop if they for whatever reason decide to cross you trajectory

same if there are any occlusions that prevent you from making sure that there are no people that could cross your trajectory

He emerged from behind an acoustic panel, so I wasn't seeing him there - he wasn't even supposed to be there anyway. Actually, if I arrived a second later I would not have enough time to react. Would it be still my fault then?

> He emerged from behind an acoustic panel, so I wasn't seeing him there

You were seeing acoustic panel, and the edge of it from where someone could conceivably emerge.

Yes. You might think it's unfair. But the world and life and even law is unfair from time to time. Getting behind the wheel means taking upon yourself a risk of consequences of events you are not in full control of.

You are in control of how much risk you want to accept. If on a given road it is strictly forbidden to exceed some speed it doesn't meant that you can safely drive at this limit or you are absolved of responsibility of consequences of doing so.

If you were doing 90 instead of 130 (assuming it was allowed there) you'd have more time to react and less risk so a second wouldn't be a matter of life and death.

> You might think it's unfair.

I'm thinking this is either deep-fried sarcasm or a fringe point of view unsupported by any court of law.

Do you honestly believe this or are you leading me on?

You are right that this is unsupported by the current law. It's mostly due to lobbying by car and fuel companies. They invented the concept of jaywalking and threw money to promote it until it stuck.

Personally I don't care as much about law as about being a moral person. Law doesn't absolve me of responsibility I feel and of guilt. If you killed the guy with your car you might find out that you don't feel entirely absolved as well. I just drive accordingly. I am aware that I have it easier because I don't live in US and infrastructure where I drove ao far wasn't horrible. There are no such things as stroad here.

> I just drive accordingly.

How do you adjust your driving to people appearing in places they're explicitly forbidden to, like on a fenced off highway?

> I am aware that I have it easier because I don't live in US and infrastructure where I drove ao far wasn't horrible. There are no such things as stroad here.

I also don't live in the US. Were you assuming I'm American all this time?

> How do you adjust your driving to people appearing in places they're explicitly forbidden to, like on a fenced off highway?

Basically I drive slower. Slow enough that I can be sure that given my visibility no "hiding" pedestrian can reach any point on my trajectory at the same time as me unless they fall from a bridge or get thrown by something else. If I see pedestrians close by, I slow down. If I see something that might conceal a pedestrian that's close enough my trajectory, I slow down. At least that's what I'm aiming for. I make mistakes just like anybody else.

> Were you assuming I'm American all this time?

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend. I'm assuming that everyone is American here until I have indications otherwise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905

My comment wasn't about you specifically. I'm just saying that some roads make it harder to drive safely than others. American ones especially.

I think if you were travelling the speed limit on a road with a sidewalk and someone comes flying out onto the road on a pushbike and you hit them. You would not be at fault.

You shouldn't be doing a speed limit on a road with a sidewalk on a lane directly adjacent to a sidewalk that's not empty. But I agree that cyclists and others similar are super scary. Still, it's not always about if you hit somebody but about how hard you hit them.

That’s just ridiculous, you can for sure come up with scenarios where you just can’t do anything as a driver? With this logic, you couldn’t ever drive faster than 20 km/h next to a sidewalk because someone could suddenly jump onto the street. Do you do that?

if there are people on the sidewalk, yes, or if I don't see the side walk to verify that there are no people there

They aren't random people, in this example, they are pedestrian's who choose to cross public infrastructure without giving way to heavy machinery that has right of way.

robotaxis equipped with cowbells. Problem solved.

Robotaxis will fix this problem as they just won’t hit pedestrians as much because they’ll check for pedestrians.

So far that prediction hasn’t borne out.

Robotaxis hit far fewer pedestrians per mile than human driven cars.

I see this asserted often but the serious attempts to tabulate it I've seen showed the opposite.

Can’t see the pedestrian if they’re already under the robotaxi.

> DRIVERS hit pedestrians.

That's crazy. Next you'll tell me guns don't kill people.

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